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November 2015

Princeton Agrees to Consider Removing a President’s Name By Liam Stack and Gabriel Fisher

Princeton students ended a 32-hour sit-in in the university president’s office on Thursday night after administrators signed a document that committed them to begin conversations about addressing racial tension on campus, including possibly removing the name of former President Woodrow Wilson from some public spaces, the university and students said.

The sit-in came amid racial tension and escalating student activism on college campuses nationwide and focused in part on what students called Wilson’s legacy of racism. Shortly after the document was signed, an administrator received a bomb or firearm threat by email. It was being investigated late Thursday.

Wilson graduated from Princeton in 1879 and served as its president from 1902 to 1910 before becoming president of the United States from 1913 until 1921. Historians often remember him for liberal internationalism amid the horrors of World War I, but he also held a number of racist views.

A group of about 20 graduate students gathered in the Columbia Law School lobby on Wednesday for what they called an emergency town hall meeting to discuss discrimination on campus.Princeton Students Hold Sit-In on Racial InjusticeNOV. 18, 2015
Christopher L. Eisgruber, the university’s president, told students Wednesday that he agreed that Wilson had been a racist but that he had done some things that were honorable and others that were worthy of scorn.

Familiar Tree Prevails in Car-Scent Trademark Suit By Andy Newman

“But on cross-examination, a lawyer for Car-Freshner, Jonathan Z. King, caught Mr. Elassir in an inconsistency.He recounted a deposition in which Mr. Elassir said he changed the freshener header card to more closely resemble his company’s canned fresheners, which are a bigger seller. Then he showed a photo showing that the color schemes were actually different.“Your canned products, which you say were the inspiration for your paper products, they don’t look anything like them, do they?”“No,” Mr. Elassir eventually conceded. A few minutes later, Mr. King ran through the similarities between Exotica’s packaging and Little Trees’ and asked Mr. Elassir, “Is your testimony under oath that that’s all just a coincidence?”

Little Trees, the giant in the forest of tree-shaped automotive air fresheners, trounced a small rival in a trademark suit in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday.

A jury found that the other company, Exotica Fresheners Company, had infringed on Little Trees’ trademark with the look of its product. In addition to changing its packaging, Exotica will have to pay the Car-Freshner Corporation, maker of Little Trees, $52,000.

Car-Freshner sued Exotica after Exotica changed the card at the top of its packaging, known as a header card, to include a green tree logo, upward-slanting text and a yellow background, all of which had been used by Little Trees for decades.

The case turned on whether some consumers were likely to be confused by the overall look of the product, known as its “trade dress.”

RUTHIE BLUM: THE DANGERS OF DISTINCTION

On Wednesday, Boko Haram hit the top of the Global Terrorism Index. The Nigerian organization, which recently aligned itself with the Islamic State group, earned this distinction for having slaughtered 20,000 people and causing more than 2 million people to flee their homes over the last six years.

The reason this fact has elicited barely a yawn among anyone other than a handful of reporters is because most people know nothing, and care less, about the goings-on in West Africa. Bleeding-heart Westerners occasionally make a fuss about that area when raising funds for the war on AIDS, but where Islamic barbarism is concerned, no outrage is heard, in spite of the ongoing mass murder taking place in plain sight.

The same goes for Syria. For decades, huge numbers of men, women and children have been tortured, shot, bombed and poisoned by the regimes of Bashar Assad and his father, Hafez, before him. Yet it is only the plight of and fight over the refugees that has caused a stir — and political battles in the West that follow ideological lines.

In contrast, when Paris suffered last Friday night what is being called “France’s 9/11,” the outcry from every corner of the world was swift and loud, even among state sponsors of terrorism bent on subjugating the West.

CAROLINE GLICK: WHO IS BEING DELUSIONAL?

On Tuesday night Channel 10 broadcast an interview with PLO chief and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas in which Abbas admitted publically for the first time that he rejected the peace plan then prime minister Ehud Olmert offered him in 2008.

Olmert’s plan called for Israel to withdraw from the entire Old City of Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, and from 93.7 percent of Judea and Samaria. Olmert also offered sovereign Israeli territory to the Palestinians to compensate for the areas Israel would retain in Judea and Samaria.

Abbas said his rejection was unequivocal. “I didn’t agree. I rejected it out of hand.”

For years, the story of Abbas’s rejection of Olmert’s 2008 offe has been underplayed. Many commentators have insisted Abbas didn’t really reject it, he just failed to respond.

But now the truth is clear. Abbas is not interested either in peace or in Palestinian statehood.

Abbas’s many apologists in the Israeli Left insist that he didn’t reject the plan on its merits. Rather, they argue, Abbas rejected Olmert’s offer because by the time Olmert made it, he was steeped in criminal investigations that forced him to resign from office eight months later.

Still blaming the Jews: Judith Bergman

Old habits are hard to break, and in Europe, it would seem, almost impossible. First, Swedish Foreign ‎Minister Margot Wallstrom said that “to counteract the radicalization, we must go back to the ‎situation such as the one in the Middle East, of which not least the Palestinians see that there is no future: We must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence.”

Then Dutch ‎Socialist Party Chairman Jan Marijnissen did not hesitate to link the Islamic State terror attacks on Paris to the Palestinian ‎issue:‎ “Their behavior eventually is connected also to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The guys — I assume they were guys — who carried out the attacks probably come from a ‎group of outraged people from the French suburbs.” The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he added, “is ‎the growth medium for such an attack.”‎

Le Monde, a leading French newspaper, echoed this sentiment in its analysis, saying that it was necessary ‎that France demand that the international community immediately establish a Palestinian state and that ‎Israel return to the pre-1967 borders.‎

This is classic European scapegoating. While that strategy may have worked for Europe one way or an‎other in the past, this time it will not. Islamic State is targeting the very heart of European cities — their ‎transportation systems, bars, restaurants, concert halls, and sports stadiums — and the Europeans can try ‎all they want to run away from the reality of this, but the truth is that there is nowhere to hide. ‎Europe has pandered to the Arab world and tried to appease it for decades and all that it has brought ‎Europeans is carnage, bloodbaths and hell on earth. This hell did not begin on Friday, Nov. 13. It ‎began, on a truly large scale, with Madrid in 2004, when 191 people were murdered and 2,000 wounded ‎in terrorist attacks. Still, even now, Europeans are talking of meeting the seething hatred and ‎determination of Islamic State with love and understanding and — of course — a state for the Palestinians.‎

MARK DURIE: LOVE ALONE IS NOT ENOUGH

Walid Aly is a well-known Australian media commentator. This week on Channel Ten’s The Project he produced an impassioned and compelling speech about the Paris killings. This went viral, achieving 27 million views on social media within just a few days. That is more hits than there are people in Australia.

According to Walid Aly, ISIS is weak but it hides this because it wants us all to be afraid, very afraid. Its whole purpose is that our fear will turn to hate, and hate will ripen into ‘World War III’.

All people of good will who would stand against ISIS, Muslim or non-Muslim alike, must therefore come together in unity. According to Walid Aly, love, and less hate is what we need.

Walid Aly is absolutely right that we do need love. But like the air we breathe, love by itself is not enough. It is not all we need.

We also need truth, and a whole lot more of it. John’s gospel reports that Jesus came ‘full of grace and truth.’ Truth without grace becomes a police state. But grace without truth is every bit as dangerous.

Walid Aly himself rightly identified the Paris atrocity as an “Islamist terrorist attack”. It is not hatred to ask what this word ‘Islamist’ actually means.

INVITING CATASTROPHE THROUGH OUR PORTS OF ENTRY : MICHAEL CUTLER

The deadly threats to the homeland posed by the legal immigration system.

For many years most people assumed that any discussion about immigration needed to focus on illegal immigration and the supposed “four border states” along the U.S./Mexican border.

My July 6, 2014 FrontPage article, “Border Security and the Immigration Colander: Why the breakdown of the Southwest border is only the tip of the iceberg” explained that our immigration system has many components and that not only must the U.S./Mexican border be secured, but that all elements of the immigration system must possess integrity if we are to be protected.

On February 5, 2015 FrontPage Magazine published my article, “The ‘Secure Our Border First Act’ Deception: Why it’s no solution to the immigration crisis.”

The official government report “9/11 and Terrorist Travel: Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States” focused specifically on the ability of the terrorists to travel around the world, enter the United States and ultimately embed themselves in America as they went about their deadly preparations.

Page 54 contained this excerpt under the title “3.2 Terrorist Travel Tactics by Plot”:

Although there is evidence that some land and sea border entries (of terrorists) without inspection occurred, these conspirators mainly subverted the legal entry system by entering at airports.

The demise of academic freedom When politically correct ‘speech police’ are given the upper hand by Gerald Walpin

• Gerald Walpin served as a U.S. inspector general from 2007 to 2009. He is the author of “The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution” (Significance Press, 2013).

Last week, I was attacked by so-called “diversity” groups at Yale Law School because I had accepted an invitation from a student group (providing a forum for diversity of ideas), to speak on the meaning of the Birthright provision of the 14th Amendment. Without having heard what I would say, this speech-suppression coalition sought to prevent me from speaking by charging that I would utter “anti-immigrant rhetoric,” rest on “racist assumptions,” and express “racist and xenophobic ideas,” and “hateful ideologies.”

As a 1955 graduate of Yale Law School, it was difficult to believe that students who came to this excellent school would seek to prevent a diverse view from being expressed. After all, lawyers in the real world must be trained to hear their adversary’s differing views and be willing to answer them. Yale Law School itself proudly announces on its web site that it is “renowned as a center of constitutional law” — attained certainly by constant discourse, including differing views on the meaning of Constitutional provisions.

This was not simply an attack on my free speech right. It was an attack on all students’ right to obtain the benefit of free speech by hearing different views. Most disconcerting, it was not a single incident, but one of many in the nationwide movement at schools to suppress any thinking that the self-appointed student and faculty thought-police find unacceptable.

America’s Cultural Revolution Reaches Amherst : Andrew Harrod

I am rather troubled by recent developments at my alma mater, the Fairest College.
In dismaying news for a troubled alumnus, America’s politically correct student revolutionaries have not bypassed Amherst College, as shown by a November 12-13 sit-in at the college’s Frost Library. Amherst events provide a case study of modern academia’s leftist domination with grave implications for academic freedom.

The student protesters issued a statement befitting the Maoist demands for self-criticism of China’s Cultural Revolution Red Guards, although no cannibalism has yet occurred at Amherst. The protestors decried Amherst being “complicit in oppressive organizations” against the “systematically oppressed” and demanded statements of apologies from Amherst’s Board of Trustees Chairman and President Biddy Martin. Although “only a part of short-term healing,” this apology would address Amherst staff, students, and alumni who had suffered the modern lament of lacking a “safe space for them to thrive while at Amherst College.”

Unbeknownst to many at the “Fairest College,” these individuals endured a catalogue of horrors of several injustices including but not limited to our institutional legacy of white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism, anti-Latin racism, anti-Native American racism, anti-Native/indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, anti-Middle Eastern racism, heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, mental health stigma, and classism.

While no institution is perfect, such sins and any corresponding inability of the Amherst College community to thrive are not immediately apparent. A campus statue commemorates Amherst alumnus and abolitionistHenry Ward Beecher while a captured Confederate cannon in a college building recalls Amherst students who fought in the Civil War. Amherst’s Charles Drew Memorial Culture House carries the name of another alumnus who was a medical pioneer and, like civil rights legal pioneer Charles Hamilton Houston, is among Amherst’s distinguished African-American graduates. The first Japanese graduate of a Western institution of higher learning, Joseph Hardy Neesima (Amherst Class of 1870), initiated Amherst’s longstanding relationship with Japan.

41 years. $3 billion. Inside the Clinton donor network.By Matea Gold, Tom Hamburger and Anu Narayanswamy

A Washington Post investigation reveals how Bill and Hillary Clinton have methodically cultivated donors over 40 years, from Little Rock to Washington and then across the globe. Their fundraising methods have created a new blueprint for politicians and their donors.

LITTLE ROCK — Over four decades of public life, Bill and Hillary Clinton have built an unrivaled global network of donors while pioneering fundraising techniques that have transformed modern politics and paved the way for them to potentially become the first husband and wife to win the White House.
The grand total raised for all of their political campaigns and their family’s charitable foundation reaches at least $3 billion, according to a Washington Post investigation.
Their fundraising haul, which began with $178,000 that Bill Clinton raised for his long-shot 1974 congressional bid, is on track to expand substantially with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 White House run, which has already drawn $110 million in support.
The Post identified donations from roughly 336,000 individuals, corporations, unions and foreign governments in support of their political or philanthropic endeavors — a list that includes top patrons such as Steven Spielberg and George Soros, as well as lesser-known backers who have given smaller amounts dozens of times. Not included in the count are an untold number of small donors whose names are not identified in campaign finance reports but together have given millions to the Clintons over the years.
The majority of the money — $2 billion — has gone to the Clinton Foundation, one of the world’s fastest-growing charities, which supports health, education and economic development initiatives around the globe. A handful of elite givers have contributed more than $25 million to the foundation, including Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra,who is among the wealthy foreign donors who have given tens of millions.